The political novel

by Joseph Blotner

When Sinclair published Oil! in 1926 he saw the activities of the labor movement almost completely in terms of a class struggle. But it was an index of the relative progress of the American movement as compared with the English that strike violence remained the chief weapon on this side of the Atlantic. Two years later, in Boston, the situation was worse. He wrote that Massachusetts had “evolved a complete technique of labor smashing” in which a strike-breaking department developed in the Boston police force was rented out to manufacturers in neighboring towns. He concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were not convicted and executed for a fatal armed robbery. They were killed because they represented the forces of social revolt to the banking and industrial interests which felt themselves critically threatened. Even eight years later, In Dubious Battle represented large segments of the labor group as ill-treated men whose efforts to attain better wages and working conditions were opposed, not only by the employers, but by the forces of the state as well. It is in Dos Passos’ books that the American labor movement is seen making the transition from economic to political action. In Adventures of a Young Man the pecan-shellers, the miners, the auto-workers are organized as forces which will obtain concessions through direct economic action rather than legislation. But The Grand Design shows labor at work within the Democratic Party. There is no nationwide labor party, but the votes of the labor group are marshalled in support of candidates whose programs will provide them with legislative relief.

The continental labor movements, particularly the Italian, are portrayed in the novel as having a greater history of violence and misfortune than those in either England or the United States. Taddei’s Socialist workers take over their factories at gun point. Silone’s laborers are victimized by The Promoter. Koestler’s Rubashov recalls his mission of telling Little Loewy that the interests of his Belgian dock workers were to be subordinated to those of Russia. Similarly, the Fascists had destroyed the Italian labor movement for the purposes of the corporate state. And, of course, the classic irony was the full name for which “Nazi” stood: National Socialist German Workers Party.

The behavior patterns of the labor movement traced in the novel reveal gradual change. A more homogeneous and dynamic group than the peasants, labor has just as extensive a heritage of exploitation and strife. Although leadership has sometimes come from outside their class, it has been provided to a large extent by a dedicated and indigenous elite. Whole national labor movements have been submerged under totalitarianism; others have appeared to be sacrificed as pawns by leaders intent upon personal aggrandizement. But as the movement has matured, old weapons have been used with increasing moderation and new ones have been added to the arsenal. Organs such as the CIO Political Action Committee appear in none of the novels in this study, but such instruments typify the new tactics by which gains are obtained through political pressure. The archetype, of course, is England’s Labour Party, which, in assuming national power, has had to make the final transition by directing legislation which should benefit not only its own members but those of all classes of the nation. This represents an evolutionary development which is a reflection of some of the English national characteristics seen in the novel. Perhaps one ends not with a conclusion but with a question. The conservatives and liberals, the Republicans and Democrats, derive their strength from areas which are fairly well defined but which to some extent cut across economic and occupational lines. Can an instrument forged in hottest partisan conflict discharge the responsibility which comes with the attainment of the goal of political power? Can it legislate for a society, or will its antecedents compel it to serve a special interest group?

Proletarians

During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel. This type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group behavior patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more sociological than political. There are some exceptions, however. The Iron Heel, Man’s Fate, and In Dubious Battle have been called proletarian novels. Other proletarian novels not included in this study were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw, and Silone. The two novels by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line between the political and the proletarian. This is also true of A Wind Is Rising, which came after the movement as such had spent itself but which concentrated upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper. Some of the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (1932), which was meant as his contribution to the proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot to death. But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book the part of the Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan. The men of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer are proletarians, members of the Irish Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most common form, the proletarian novel stopped just short of political action. It would present in dramatic fashion the conditions under which the members of this actually diverse group lived. If they took positive action, it was usually to join a union or the Communist Party. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shows the broad scale social delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows clearly that though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual emphasis is not.

The Middle Class

The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the political novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of economics, Glenn Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle class. In terms of politics, however, they are not bourgeois but intellectuals, Jordan a liberal and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the true middle class does not provide enough drama for the novelist who deals with politics. Most of the people in It Can’t Happen Here are middle class citizens, but they do not move and act in their normal environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a dictatorship, forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He will, like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically below his. Or, like Harvey Sayler in The Plum Tree, he will rise above it through political advancement which brings him power and wealth. In rare cases, the hero will manage to ride both horses at once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s novel, will obviously be a successful candidate for the governorship of New York. But his stepping stone has been nearly twenty years of work in New York City’s tenement-ridden Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees that Stirling will be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but his career too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle class from which he started. In The Grand Design Dos Passos sometimes shows the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout District of Columbia, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes members of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there is such diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps this difficulty in discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an indication of the nature of this class. Midway between the economic and political extremes, it has a leavening of the characteristics of both. But the political figure who comes from the middle class most often leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has less interest for the political novelist.

The Rich and Well Born

The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues than any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires like Oil!'s Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of great wealth.” Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very often those usually described as “the product of exhausted loins.” Unless members of the English aristocracy take an active interest in the welfare of the classes below their own, they are usually portrayed as despising them. George Meredith’s aristocrat appears to hate these occupants of a world different from his. The Debarry family in Felix Holt has humanitarian impulses, but its political action is directed toward maintaining its elevated position. Trollope’s aristocratic Liberals make efforts toward legislation which will reduce inequities, but far more typical is the old Earl, “Buck” Lostwithiel in Fame Is the Spur. A wringer of the poor and accident-maker for inconvenient opponents, he is deterred from horsewhipping Hamer Shawcross only by a raised sabre.

The evil aristocrat is not so common in the American novel as in the English. Mrs. Stowe and Tourgée portray him during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the South. Sinclair’s Back Bay Brahmins, years later, take violent action, sticking neither at hypocrisy nor dishonesty, to assert a form of slavery which is more economic than legislative. But aside from villains such as those in The Plum Tree, whose power actually comes more from money than lineage, the villainous role is usually assigned to the industrialist rather than the blueblood. This may be a substantiation of the charge that the primary aristocracy of America is one of wealth rather than breeding or cultivation. The Italian noble class is consistently portrayed as an oppressor no matter what the form of government under which it operates. Serfs are freed and reforms are instituted in Fathers and Sons, but offstage are the sounds of floggings and the murmurs of oppressed victims. The Marchesa Raversi’s Liberal Party in The Charterhouse of Parma is anything but liberal. Individuals like the radical poet Ferrante Palla find as little favor with her as they do with the absolutist Ernesto IV. Separated from these nobles by time and space, Malraux’s Ferral and his backers have as little sympathy for the Chinese on whom they thrive as does Fabio Conti for Parma’s commoners.